Friends star Aisha Tyler: ‘Matthew Perry gave me this unbidden moment of emotional generosity’

When Ross learns that a couple of new palaeontology professors are joining his department, the last thing he expects is Charlie. “I just know they’re gonna be a couple of old wind bags wearing tweed jackets with suede elbow patches,” the dinosaur nerd, played by David Schwimmer, groans. Instead, along comes Aisha Tyler’s Charlie – a 6ft-tall knockout with shiny lip gloss, a huge brain, and a string of Nobel Prize-winning ex-boyfriends.

The sitcom was in its ninth season by the time of Charlie’s arrival in 2003, and despite being set in central Manhattan was yet to feature a single Black recurring cast member. Tyler’s casting, then, was long overdue. Charlie featured in nine episodes of the show, starting out – to Ross’s disappointment – as Joey’s (Matt LeBlanc) girlfriend. But she was smarter than all of Joey’s exes put together, so it didn’t last long, and she soon ended up in Ross’s arms behind a plant plot at a palaeontology conference in Barbados.

In the two decades since, Tyler has enjoyed a varied career – hosting Whose Line Is It Anyway? and playing a forensic psychologist on Criminal Minds. Appearing over Zoom from Brooklyn, where she’s directing an undisclosed TV show, she tells me about her historic casting, how some scenes were near impossible to shoot because she and Schwimmer were laughing so hard, and why she admires the way the Friends creators wrote her part.

Read the full interview, below…

You joined the cast of Friends 21 years ago. Do you remember the call telling you that you’d landed the part?

I’d been doing stand-up at the time, and one of the things I would watch before I got ready to go to a comedy club was Friends reruns. They were the six best sitcom actors on television, and everybody knew it – so by the time I got the Friends audition, I’d seen every episode. I remember thinking, “I’m not going to get this job, this is a massive hit and they’re gonna hire somebody famous.” But I did know how to tell a Friends joke; it had its own cadence and way of being funny.

I did one audition and then I went back and read with David [Schwimmer]. I walked in and there were a lot of very famous people there, with a lot of different looks and ethnic backgrounds. Again, it was very clear to me, ‘I’m just absolutely not getting this job. I remember Lisa Bonet was there and I was confident she’d get it – she was glowing like a goddess and floating above the floor looking like her incredible self.

And then I was driving in my car a couple of days later, and I got the call [that I’d got the part]. I remember almost wrecking the car, having to pull over to the side of the road. It was very exciting.

It was a huge hit and at the time I was the host of Talk Soup [a series poking fun at talk shows], which had maybe a million viewers a week. Friends had like 100 million viewers globally.

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Was it hard not to crack up on set? You starred in one of the best ever Friends episodes, when Ross and Charlie have a double date with Joey and Rachel, and Ross – maniacally making margaritas and fajitas – keeps insisting he’s “FINE”.

Oh, we would absolutely break as soon as they cut the scene. We all immediately erupted into laughter at the end of every take.

The very last episode that I did, when I break up with Ross and get back with Greg Kinnear’s character, my ex-boyfriend, there’s a scene where we’re talking, and David comes up in the middle of the conversation and says that we’re making him uncomfortable. It took us forever to shoot that scene – like 14 takes. I think that the British term is “corpsing”? I was in tears. We were all in absolute tears, including David. It was just impossible to shoot because we were laughing so hard.

That was a really great day because I wasn’t even supposed to be on the show that long. They only booked me for maybe four episodes, and I ended up doing nine, so it was already a bonus. And then it was a really great full circle moment because Greg Kinnear had been the first host of Talk Soup and I was the last one.

What was it like joining the core six? I imagine it must be hard coming into a show where the regular cast is so tight knit.

To their credit, they realised what an intimidating set that was. I know now, being on the other side of that in a show like Criminal Minds, which is going into its 18th season, how intimidating it can be for a guest star. But they worked really hard to make me feel comfortable and put me at ease straight away.

On my first live show, Matthew Perry said to me, “Get ready for your life to change.” And it was just those little moments of kindness that came very easily for them, but really made a difference for me – because it’s very hard to be funny if you’re frightened. You’re on a hit show and these are people you’ve watched on television and you’re standing next to them, and you just don’t want to suck.

In recent years, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston have both opened up about how they had crushes on each other through much of the show’s filming. Could you tell?

No. You could see that there was a real friendship and a bond, but they were super professional on that show. Here’s the secret for everybody reading – everybody on shows has crushes on their castmates. I think people always focus on when there’s conflict or drama, but most of the time, it’s kind of like middle school and everybody’s crushing on everybody else.

Did you have a crush on anyone on Friends?

No, I was too terrified. I was just trying not to have a meltdown. There’s no room for feelings. No crying in baseball!

So, was Matthew Perry right – did your life change?

That was this unbidden moment of emotional generosity from a guy who was incredibly famous and didn’t really need to take the time out to have this little aside with me. He gave me a moment of mindfulness to really feel that this was my big break.

The entertainment business can be overwhelming and very dissociative and confusing, and people can be so hell-bent on building success and chasing the next thing that they don’t take the time to just revel in an extraordinary moment. So, I got to be like, “Oh my God, this is extraordinary and the culmination of hard work and a lot of dreams.”

It did change my life, but not in a “fame and fortune, and she rode in on a tiger, people are feeding her grapes” sort of way. I still went back to the drawing board and was a working actor after that. But it made me more confident as a performer, to trust my instincts and my comic abilities.

And we’re still talking about it all these years later. I don’t know that there are a lot of shows that have been off the air for more than two decades that people still watch on a daily basis and new fans find all the time. Little kids come up to me and say they love the show and I’m like, “You were not alive when I was on that show! You were not yet born!” It’s rare to be on a show like that and end up in the collective memory.

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You said last year that people still approach you and call out, ‘Black girl from Friends!’ You were the only recurring Black cast member in its run. Had the lack of diversity been a point of frustration for you before you joined the show?

It was such a common refrain at the time. It wasn’t like it was just something that people looked back at later and said, “Wait a minute.” No, at the time, people talked quite a bit about the fact that, for a show that was set in the heart of Manhattan, it really lacked diversity. But we didn’t have social media back then, so it wasn’t the large-scale conversation that it became later.

There was nothing in the writing of my character or in the stage directions that indicated that Charlie was supposed to be a woman of colour. I know that David has said that he really pushed for that [more diversity] and I think that’s wonderful. But what I liked was that they just wrote this smart, sexy character and she happened to be Black and they weren’t trying to seismically change what the show was, but they were aware of the fact that it didn’t feel totally representative of the world as it existed then or had existed for many, many, many decades.

So I knew that me coming on the show was an aspect of that self-reflection.

It was a lot more subtle than, say, the self-reflection seen in Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That..., which has been criticised for its clunky over-apologising for the original show’s lack of diversity

Yes, they didn’t turn it into a “very special episode of Friends”. And it was an elegant way to do it. With a show like Sex and the City, they have tried to correct it – some of it has worked, some of it hasn’t.

Friends was also reflective of a whole business that thought that only white stories sold. I mean, that’s just been the attitude in Hollywood for a long time. They’d say people won’t watch a show with these characters, and now we all know that’s not true. But that perspective still persists and there are still people who will say, well, that movie won’t sell overseas if it has a Black lead, and that movie won’t sell in these markets if it has a gay lead.

Or they say, ‘We have our one Black show. We don’t need another one’

Without naming the project, I’ve had ones where they’re like, “We already have a Black character in that movie. We can’t have two.” I’m like, “Have you never seen two Black people in the same room in the real world? Is there just one of us? Are we like Superman and Clark Kent? When I leave the room, does Kerry Washington come in? And then you find out later we’ve been exchanging masks?” It’s just ridiculous!

It’s a ridiculous set of beliefs about the stories we tell and who will watch them, and it is shifting as more women and more people of colour and other excluded groups, and the LGBTQAI community, get behind the camera and tell their stories. We know that great stories are human stories, and they’re varied and diverse and compelling and people want to learn about people and have experiences that they haven’t had before.

Have you remained friendly with anyone from Friends?

I have seen all of the cast members over the years since the show and remain friendly with everyone. I’m quite close with Lisa Kudrow – we worked on some projects together afterwards [The Comeback and BoJack Horseman]. And I just saw everybody recently. They’re lovely people and they experience an extraordinary kind of fame that persists to this day. But they all remain smart, sanguine, intentional, kind people.

It’s been exciting to see all of them do other things afterwards and grow as people and as artists. But it’s amazing how much people still focus on Friends. Imagine if I’d done a PowerPoint presentation in my office at 25, and now I’m 55, and everyone still wants to talk about that one PowerPoint presentation. It’s all anyone wants to know about. Like, it was just such a good PowerPoint presentation!

Speaking of all your other PowerPoint presentations, tell me about what you’ve got going on at the moment. I know you’re on two long-running projects: Criminal Minds: Evolution and Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Whose Line has been such a lovely experience. I started out as a stand-up comedian, which is all about live performance. Then I had a great time in front of a live audience on Friends. So it’s been great to take both of those experiences forward and use them on this show. Especially because everything else I do is drama, so it’s great to step back into those shoes and do that kind of free, banging, wild comedy that we do on Whose Line, which has become racier and edgier and more fun each year.

And then Criminal Minds – we’re about to start filming the 18th season of the show, and that’s just surreal. I know a lot of British series will go to one or two seasons and that’s it. That’s normal. I mean, 18 seasons is unusual even for the United States. Season 17 is the best season of the show ever in the history of it being on TV – and I don’t think anyone can say that about a show that’s 17 seasons old.

I’m directing an episode of season 18, and moving into the director’s chair has been lovely. I’ve been lucky to direct on all kinds of shows, and that evolution as an artist has been really fun. It’s so nice to go to work and not have to put on makeup!